7/27/12

"To be
overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat."

-
Beverley Nichols.

Beverley Nichols was one of those versatile centipedes, filling his waking hours with
writing plays and composing music or clamber on stage as an actor or appear as
an public speaker, who's best remembered, if he's remembered at all, for a
series of books he wrote on gardening that are still in print today. The same,
alas, can't be said for his five detective novels, written and published during
the waning years of the Golden Age, about his mild-mannered and sometimes
playful (botanic) detective Horatio Green – who possesses a sensitive nose and
a proven track-record as a successful criminologist.

The
Moonflower (1955;
a.k.a. The Moonflower Murder) was my first brush with Nichols and it
left me more intrigued than floored as the plot was, uhm, interesting to say
the least. I can only describe it as a flawed gem. It focuses on the murder of
the unpopular Mrs. Faversham, whose sudden exclusion from the house to the
cemetery is merely viewed as a financial windfall by her selfish, live-in
relatives, but slowly the case morphs from a common garden variety murder into an ingeniously
contrived impossible crime – complete with hidden relationships, motive
juggling and a nifty turn on that trite plot-device of changed wills on the
eve of a murder. That's the main strength of this book: a solution that not
only lives up to its premise but blows it out of the water. When Green began
to explain, I stopped caring about any of the tiny imperfections, cracks or
internal flaws that mar this little gem. Sometimes the story that goes
with a piece of antique is of more value than the piece itself. So... now that
we got the conclusion of this review out of the way, I can actually start writing it.

At
opening pages of this story, Horatio Green's professional interest in Candle
Court, Mrs. Faversham's estate, restricts itself to her plant room, where a
rare moonflower from Uruguay is on the brink of blossoming, and as an amateur gardener
he’s there merely as a privileged witness. But the classic, storybook signs of
an imminent assassination are all there. Mrs. Faversham makes herself
everything but agreeable, turning Beryl, her son's wife, out of there favorite
room the provide a bed and roof to one of her guests. Subtle little things like that would
drive a lot of people to murder, except for the fact that Beryl is more than deserving of
a personal tormentor and I would not have blamed Nichols one bit if he had "spiced-up"
the plot with her being pushed down a flight of stairs or into the swirling
river that provides a permanent background noise at Candle Court. Unfortunately,
the body count begins and ends with Mrs. Faversham, with a pair of hands clasped
tightly around her throat, and the illustrious moonflower is found to have
blossomed prematurely!

The plot
is pleasantly busy, regularly throwing new developments and revelations at the
reader and investigators, enwrapping both of them as tightly as in an insect in
a spider's web. Green is also a fun detective who reminded another reviewer of
Clyde Clason's T.L. Westborough, and, while I do not entirely disagree, he
impressed me as a cross between a slightly more intelligent, but equally
enthusiastic, Roger Sharingham and a toned-down Dr. Gideon Fell who only clung to his
penchant for muttering cryptic remarks. He's also prone to staging little experiments
to observe people's responses to it. It is, therefore, a pity he was unable to
straighten out and streamline the plot better and deliver a genuine classic.
Some clues were shared, others were not and some unnecessary plot threads could've
easily been cutout without losing anything. I mean, what was the whole point of
the convict's escape, when he was almost immediately eliminated as a suspect,
or even bringing up that incident in Uruguay?

One more
thing that's worth mentioning is that the book has a social conscience. Green
is reprimanded by Beryl for talking to one of the servants as if he was a
gentleman, but the reader knows what Green thinks of her opinion, which, as
good form dictates, he does not utter out loud, and part of the solution
raises an issue that would become an important one in the following decade –
giving this fantastic story a surprisingly human touch. But it's
not surprising that Nichols felt the need to point out the unfair treatment of
people based on how or where they were born. You see, Nichols was so
inconsiderate to be gay in a time when it was not done.

Tsk, tsk, Mr.
Nichols. I thought you and Leo Bruce were plotting a mystery novel. No wonder
we never got that crossover meeting between Horatio Green and Sgt. Beef. Oh,
come on! You know it must have happened. They were contemporaries who wrote
detective stories and you know how these things go. Bruce comes over see to
the garden, they share a beer or two and before you know it there are two ties,
a shirt and three socks drapped over a branch. Love... it's a
beautiful thing. :)

All in
all, I can recommend this book to readers prepared to take its flaws as well
and to fellow aficionados of the locked room mystery. It’s not exactly a
one-of-a-kind locked room, but it's close enough to being one and a
good one at that.

Afterthought: the only thing I really disliked about The Moonflower is that it didn't provide me with an opportunity to work in a reference to The Thing in Mrs. Faversham's Attic without using a giant shoehorn.

Beverley Nichols (1898-1983)

"Most of us rather like our cats to have a streak of wickedness. I should not feel quite easy in the company of any cat that walked about the house with a saintly expression."

7/25/12

Liberating
a brand new volume from the ongoing Case Closed/Detective Conan
series from its cardboard packaging, before even glancing at the other mail, is, for me, an experience similar as to
when I used to make a traditional grab for the latest Appie Baantjer novel from
the shelves of one of the local bookstores – usually on the day the book came
out. Yeah, yeah. There was a period in my life when a normal bookstore
had everything in stock to keep me complacent, as opposed to now, when I prefer
to take out a digital shop cart instead. Anyway, I guess I
love this series because it has replaced Baantjer as a fixed habit and
the pages of each new collection is like an unbrowsed meadow folding out
in front of me like a playing board, dotted with places named Coffee Poirot,
Restaurant Colombo and Books Baker Street, on which a kid-sized game piece
moves around like a dark horse – translating dying messages, deciphering codes and unlocking
sealed rooms. The clues are many and suspect abound!

(note: I penned this review in a hurry and traces of sloppiness are bound to turn up. Please be so kind as to ignore them until they go away).

The Game's Afoot!

A fiend
referred to as "The Slasher" rips through the opening of the 43rd volume of
this series, but the police looses the knife-wielding madman in a crowd of
people, however, he has left them a tangible clue: a strange and bloody imprint
of a symbol that turns out to be the logo of a car. Everyone in the vicinity
driving such a car is brought in and Conan observes, behind the protective
reflection of a one-way looking glass, how one of them slips up. It's not one
of the best stories, weakly motivated and you have to accept the premise that
all of the suspects lost the master key of their car, but it's another fine
example of Aoyama taking full advantage of the visual element of his stories
and hides clues in characters behavior, sticks them on their clothes or
scatters them across their rooms. This dovetailing of clues, plot-threads and
red herrings is very satisfying and a particular good example can be found in
the main story of this collection.

But first
we drop by Coffee Poirot, where we find Richard Moore, known around the world
as the famous "Sleeping Moore," taking his morning coffee and Aoyama must have
been in an unusual whimsical mood when he wrote this story. Aoyama is not a
dark writer in any sense of the word, usually giving his stories a
light-hearted touch in the end (if they are dark to begin with), but seldom genuinely funny. Well, he got a smile
out of me with the opening lines of this story – narrated by Moore
himself.

"I'm
Richard Moore... Private Eye. Missing persons and cheating spouses are my bread
and butter, but every now and them I get tangled up in something a little
bloodier. Crimes of revenge, money, passion. This is one sick world I live
in. And when ever the rough life of a detective starts to wear me down... I
come to Poirot. A cup of Joe soothes my wounded soul and... YEOWW!"

That last
part is not a typo. Moore burned himself when he took a swig from his scolding
hot coffee. Fortunately, the waitress hands him a case that rapidly develops into
one of the biggest of his careers: a customer has left a phone and Moore has to
tack him down. Routine stuff. A list of numbers on the phone complicated the
case and turns into a deduction story in which Conan has to deduce the suspect
from a small group of people and one of the clues, or "indicators," as they are
apparently called in contemporary crime fiction, is almost as endearing as the
opening scene of this story.

The third
story is the main course of this volume and opens with Conan picking up a
detective novel from a bookstore, Kaori Shinmei's The Wicked Will, a
reference going all the way back to the 19th installment, and plans to greedily
read his way to the solution. Sounds familiar? Than you might guess what
happens next: back home he finds two of his friends, Kazuha and Harley, on his
doorstep who want to drag him (and Rachel and Richard Moore) off to Osaka for
some fun – except they disagree on where to go. So what easier way to decide
than a duel in deduction? Yes. Flipping a coin would suffice, but where's the
fun in that? The problem they tackle is that of the unsolved murder of a toy
manufacturer, who was tied-up in his office before being murdered, but was able
to leave a cryptic message spelled out in ink-smeared blocks of wood. I have to
admit that deciphering the dying message is a Herculean task for Western
readers, but the (visual) clues that were strewn all over the place compensated
for this. You don't have to understand Japanese to figure what about scene of the crime felt off to Conan. The motive is interesting but
underdeveloped.

This
chapter in the lives of Conan (Shinichi) and Rachel has convinced me that their
problem is eventually going to be resolved with a cop-out like "I-Knew-It-All-Along" explanation, which will probably also be offered to
account for her stubbornly sticking to Shinichi's side – in spite of being
separated for nearly two years. This is the only plot strand that began to
bother me more and more as the series went on. The final chapters set-up a story that will be concluded in the next volume and therefore won't discuss it here.

On a
whole, this was another good bundle of stories, from one of the most prolific
writers of neo-orthodox detective fiction alive today, whose imagination has
all the qualities of an inexhaustible well – continuously pulling up buckets of
these stories from its depths. Although, considering the ongoing success of the
series, it’s more a roaring wall of water coming your way. If only more readers over here would
allow themselves to be swept away by it.

7/22/12

"My work in the Department of
Queer Complaints is concerned only with the improbable and, well, frankly,
the unbelievable."

- Colonel March (The Sorcerer).

John Dickson Carr's Mephistophelean
cunning and his incurable romantic disposition proved to be a fruitful union
that gave birth to a number of memorable detectives, like the Chestertonian Dr.
Gideon Fell and the curmudgeonly Sir Henry Merrivale, but it was his official
policeman, Colonel March of Department 3-D of Scotland Yard, who became a
regular on the small screen between 1956 and 1957 – finding an explanation for
more than twenty cases of the bizarre and impossible.

Col. March has an eye for details

The thirty-minute episodes were (loosely)
based on the stories in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), in
which Colonel March is called upon to investigate implausible stories in order
to determine whether they are exaggerations, hoaxes or cleverly disguised
crimes. Colonel March of Scotland Yard follows the pattern of the short
stories, but the inescapable modifications are present as well and the most "eye-catching" one is Boris Karloff as March – who doesn't fit the description
of a speckled man with bland eyes and a short pipe projecting from under a
cropped moustache (which may be sandy or gray). Inexplicably, March was given
an eye-patch, which occasionally causes a collision with one of the sets that
wobbled in the background, but Karloff played the amiable detective
convincingly and actually gave March more of a personality than he had in the original
stories.

I finally decided to watch a few episodes
and in spite of the dated production values, retooled stories or forgetting to
drop a clue here and there it was a blast to watch. It’s basically a direct
ancestor of Jonathan Creek with its locked rooms, bizarre occurrences
and light-hearted undertone.

The framework of The New Invisible Man
is the same as its eponymous story and has March looking into the unbelievable story
of Major Henry Rodman, who witnessed a shooting in the apartment of his neighbors
and the only description he was able to give of the murderer is that of a pair of
floating, disembodied gloves – filled with invisible hands. However, this amusing
yarn Carr spun was merely a subplot in the episode and a layer saturated with criminal
intent was added to the story, which, IMO, was a mistake. The story from the collection
perfectly demonstrated what kind of unusual problems March's department handles
and tossing a common garden variety of crime cheapened the plot. But it was fun
to see with my own eyes how the trick looks like in real-life.

"Piltdown Man" hoax inspired the following episode.

An ancient skull called "Damascus Man,"
known as The Missing Link, which's also the title that was slapped on
this episode and opens with an attempted theft of the skull by two museum employees,
Tom Grafton and Evelyn Innes, in order to expose Sir Henry Danier as a fraud –
except that the skull does end being stolen but by whom and why? This is more a
story of crime and archeological skullduggery than of detection, but an
enjoyable one at that.

Over the course of the next episode, The
Sorcerer, John Cusby suspect his wife's psycho-analyst, Dr. James Patten,
of plotting her demise and fumes with malicious intent, but it's his wife who
ends up as a suspect when Dr. Patten is stabbed to death with one of her
hatpins inside his, locked and windowless, treatment room – with Mrs. Cusby as
its only other occupant. I was afraid the entire episode that the plot would
hinge on hypnosis with Mrs. Cusby as a remote-controlled assassin, but the
trick used to enter the sealed room was surprisingly good. Simple
but effective.

Death in Inner Space is Carter Dickson as conceived by Clayton Rawson or Fredric Brown,
opening with March giving a speech for the Society of Interplanetary Communication,
where’s invited by Dr. Hodek to spend a few days at his home – where's working
on experiments with suspended animation. He’s convinced that he has been
receiving radio signals from Mars and that, one day, we will be able to visit
our Martian neighbors and his work is the first step. Unfortunately, one of his
experiments goes horribly wrong and his volunteer dies due to a lack of oxygen
in spite of a perfectly working alarm system that should've warned Hodek in
case anything went wrong. Not all that bad, but the premise was more
interesting than the solution and the ending was ambiguous.

The Invisible Knife has an unusual take on the multiple spouse-killers: a man who
regularly has to bury business partners. Basil Pennacott had them all over the
world, from Bombay to Tangier, and he profited from all of them – especially after
they died. Four of them appeared to have died of natural causes, but the fifth,
Edmund Hays, was stabbed in the proverbial locked room while attempting to
summon demons. Pennacott was there with him, but was never charged because the
police was unable to find the murder weapon. But now that Basil has come back
to England, he finds himself being threatened by the Hays' brother, who mailed
him a dead parrot with a poisoned beak, and asks March to protect his life.
This gives the story a nice dual conflict of having to protect an unscrupulous
murderer on one hand and trying to prevent an innocent man from becoming one on the other. The trick for the vanishing murder weapon was culled
from "The Dragon in the Pool," which was a radio play Carr penned for Appointment
with Fear.

You can expect more posts on this series
in the not-so distant future, but you can also discover them for yourselves on YouTube.

7/20/12

Ghosts,
goblins and other grotesque imaginations that pried themselves loose from the
human mind have proven themselves prone to sudden bursts of stage fright,
whenever they are expected to perform under controlled conditions and the cold
discerning eye of reason, but what if you have a reputedly haunted room with a
malevolent ghost as a permanent tenant... who's not shy at all?

Well,
that's the plot of Derek Smith's Whistle Up the Devil (1954), an
ingenious locked room novel that has been on my wish list for years but got
top-priority when Patrick posted a mouthwatering review of the book and spiced
it up with lots of background information on the author of this little gem. I
won't reproduce it here, but from it a picture emerged of a man we all would've
loved unconditionally. Derek Smith was apparently a kind and generous man who
was above all a mystery fan, and a clever one as that. Patrick began his review
with his concluding opinion of the book and it's one I would like to echo
before I begin to look for the words to shape mine: Whistle Up the Devil
is one of the most ingeniously concocted and worked out impossible crimes that
I have read and you almost wonder if Satan himself sat down with Smith to plot
the story.

The story
opens with an early phone call from Chief Inspector Castle to his friend and
dilettante sleuth, Algy Lawrence, with a request to go to home of personal
friend, Roger Querrin, who's determined to keep an appointment with the family
ghost in a locked and haunted room – giving a perfect cover for an assassin to
strike and unburden the guilt on a ghostly murderer who can't be cuffed or
hanged for it. Everyone in his household is trying to keep Roger from spending
the evening with a long dead relative, like his fiancé and his brother, who's
worrying himself into a straightjacket, but he stands firm and guards are
posted outside the room to stand guard. (including a policeman outside who
keeps a hawk's eye on the window). But naturally a piercing scream shatters the
peaceful night. And as the door is taken down, they're only just in time to
see Roger taking his last breath as he collapses. A dagger that was in a sheath
on the wall was sticking out of his back like a well-fed parasite.

Unfortunately,
the supernatural elements are not played up as one would expect from a premise
like the one I just sketched and this was perhaps most notable in the Querrin
family legend, which gets a brief and a guess of an explanation towards the
end, however, this is merely a stylistic flaw and one that's more than
compensated with an intricate plot that is woven like a mesh of hex netting.
There is, for example, the obligatory "Locked Room Lecture," nearly all these
novels with a grand status seems to have one, but here's its not just to
show-off the authors knowledge of the genre but to drive the reader (and
Castle) up the wall by demonstrating just how impossible this murder really is –
simply by eliminating every known trick in the book.

Whistle
Up the Devil is
also scattered with references to other detective stories and they're not the
usual bunch of suspects, like The HanshewsThe Man of the Forty
Faces (1910), Rupert Penny's Sealed Room Murder (1951), which had a
good trick but was tedious to read, and Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top
Hat (1938), showing the individual taste of Smith.

As one of
those celebrated, but obscure, monuments of the locked room sub-genre, there's
also the second obligatory murder that mimics the maddening impossibilities of
the first one and this time the backdrop is between the walls of a room
supposedly a stronghold of safety: a prison cell in an occupied police station.
A man named Simon Turner was deposited in one of their jails after assaulting
Algy and sergeant Hardinge during a nightly prowl on the Querrin premise, but
prying any information from him on what he may have seen is another impossibility
dropped in the lap of our investigators – followed by another one when the
murderer made sure he stays as quiet as humanly possible. The lock of the
cell door was picked and Turner had been expertly strangled and according to
the medical evidence the murder took place when Algy and Hardinge were talking
in the Charge Room, which you have to pass if you want to go the cells. Guess
what... they didn't saw a soul! Not a visible one, anyway.

The
murders are pulled off with the routine a stage magician saws a woman in half,
but, surprisingly, it did not lack any believability because Smith dovetails
every snippet of plot together to form a coherent sequence of events that you
can’t help but believe it could be pulled-off like that. I also loved how he continuously
made me switch between two suspects only to show me what a fool I have been in
the end. This makes it very heart to care for a few not so well drawn
characters, ghosts who prefer to keep snoring in their graves or tip-toeing
poltergeists. Whistle Up the Devil simply is a collaborative labor of
love between the enthusiastic heart and sharp brain of a very big mystery fan. So much is obvious from reading this book.

Smith
did wrote a follow-up novel, Come to Paddington Fair (1997), but he was
unable to find a publisher until a fan published it in a limited release of 100
copies in Japan (published in English) and is impossible to find. If you want
to know about Smith, I urge you to read Patrick's in-depth post of this book
and the man who penned it. Oh, and Patrick... Damn you! You were not suppose to tempt me with our tempting reviews. Aim for the unenlightened masses!

7/19/12

"I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on
a novel, what I read."

- John Sladek.

In 1972,
the Times of London organized a short story competition for detective
stories and after the jury, comprising of Lord Butler, Tom Stoppard and the
Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, had ploughed through a 1000 stories – it was
John Sladek's "By an Unknown Hand" who let his fellow competitors biting the
dust of defeat. His award: the story was published in The Times Anthology of
Detective Stories (1972) and a contract to pen one of my all-time favorite
locked room novels, Black Aura (1974), and he wrote a follow up a few years
later entitled Invisible Green (1977).

These stories
are very well-known among locked room enthusiasts, like yours truly, but a let less
familiar are the (non-impossible) short-short story "It Takes Your Breath Away," featuring
Sladek's series detective Thackeray Phin, and a body of inverted mysteries with
a twist, collected in Maps (2002), which I recommend without hesitation.
But Sladek also wrote a parody on the impossible crime genre, aptly titled "The
Locked Room," which is virtually unknown because it's inexplicably buried in a
volume of science-fiction stories – Keep the Giraffe Burning (1978). It
you've always wondered what would happen if you tossed Douglas Adams or Monty Python into the
blender with John Dickson Carr's "The Locked Lecture," a chapter from The Hollow Man
(1935), than you have to read this story.

The
protagonists of this yarn are Fenton Worth, a lauded private investigator, and
his valet, Bozo, but instead of taking on a case that's probably on their
doorstep waiting to be let in he locks himself up in his library to read a mystery novel with The
Locked Room (????) as its tantalizing title. As he reads through the pages,
he begins to reflect on the miracles he has explained himself and goes over a
lot of the familiar (and often trite) methods mentioned in Dr. Fell's lecture and
has a good laugh at their expense. He also a few, uhm, interruptions from
prospective clients.

Sladek
also wrote a mini-short story into this already short, short story and has
Worth reflecting back on "The Case of the Parched Adjutant," in which "a
retired military gentleman of sober and regular habits" and "an ardent anti-vivisectionist"
is murdered in his locked study on the day the circus was in town. It's campy
and absurd, but futile to suppress a grin while reading it.

One
more thing worth mentioning, is that Worth had to cut open the pages of the book he was reading. I was
aware you had to do this back in the days with (some) hard covers, but I think
this is the first time I have seen it being described in a story.

John Sladek (1937-2000): another man who did not believe in miracles

Yes! I
have broken the dry spell of not reading any mysteries since posting my review
of Max Murray's The Sunshine Corpse (1954)! Now, if you'll excuse me, I
have to tackle a monument of a locked room story. As much as Carr hated the
modern era, I think/want to believe he would have liked this galore of busted
doors and broken locks that is my blog.

And in
case you've missed it, take a peek at my second installment of favorite locked
room mysteries: short stories and novellas.

7/18/12

"The inside is a maze of doors. Anyone wishing to
know it must dare to enter it."

- Grograman, the
Many-Colored Death (The Never-Ending Story, 1983).

Well, I
have not been granted an opportunity to (slow) burn through another detective
novel and slapping together the second installment of locked room favorites may appear as a lame attempt to come across as productive, but I have
noticed that people appreciate them and have been providing two bloggers with
reading material (On the Threshold of Chaos and Lay on the Crime).

A
well-known mystery novelist, Mark Hillyer, makes a female blackmailer disappear
from his home and the lack of footprints in the snow show that she never left
the premise, but the house is completely empty – and Hillyer's fragile
condition makes it unlikely that he buried or chopped-up the body. A story that
should be better known.

Robert
Arthur's "The 51st Sealed Room."

A copious
writer of locked room mysteries is found decapitated inside a sealed cabin, propped
up in front of his type writer and his severed head overseeing the scene from atop a
book case, but the many cameos from MWA members is what really makes this story
– as most of the clues turn out to be nothing more than red herrings. Still a fun
and solid read, though.

Sherlock
Holmes and Dr. Watson look into the deaths of a squire and a man who apparently
died from a supernatural bedside visitation, because the presence of a human
murder seems impossible.

John
Dickson Carr & Adrian Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Sealed Room."

The
previously untold story of Colonel Warburton's madness, who wounded his
wife and then shot himself in his study, which was locked and
bolted from the inside, but Holmes builds up an impressive case against a third
party from such clues as cigar smoke and broken glass.

John
Dickson Carr's "The Dead Sleep Lightly."

Originally
written as a radio play for Suspense, this is one of Carr's most eerie tales of a man haunted by the ghost of his ex-wife and the
impossibility is not just a nagging wife from beyond the grave who refuses to
accept that death parted them, but also a spectral voice that speaks the following chilling words over a
dead telephone:"But the dead sleep lightly. And they
can be lonely too." I recommend the version with Dr. Gideon Fell and was
published in the collection The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983).

G.K. Chesterton's "The Arrow from Heaven."

A millionaire is shot to death in a locked room
with an arrow and the solution for this puzzle introduces one the authors
classic, and often copied, gambits that toys with the readers presumptions –
famously revisited in one of Agatha Christie's more well-known novels.

G.K. Chesterton's "The Oracle of the Dog."

A man is stabbed to death in a watched
summerhouse and the wrong man is about to be collared, based on the testimony
of a dog, but, of course, Father Brown is the only one who was really listening
to what the dog had to say.

G.K. Chesterton's "The Miracle of Moon
Cresent."

For one reason or another, this has always been
one of my favorite Father Brown stories and always thought it was grossly
underrated as a locked room mystery – which is that of the disappearance of a
man from a watched room and was later found hanging in the gardens below. The
solution is what you can expect from Chesterton.

G.K. Chesterton's "The Secret Garden."

This eerie tale of a dark,
impenetrable garden and a beheading anticipates early Carr and seems to have
been a model for the Japanese-style of plotting – especially of locked room mysteries.

G.K. Chesterton's "The Invisible Man."

Only here because of its pedigree and to keep
you from asking why I didn’t include it in this list.

G.K. Chesterton's "The Fairytale of Father
Brown."

Plot-wise, not his best story, but what a fantastic
premise! Father Brown assumes the role of armchair detective to explain how a
man could've been shot in a country without guns.

My
favorite of the Poirot short stories, in which Christie perfectly knitted two
impossibilities, a predictive dream and a murder in a watched room, in a
fascinating pattern and with a satisfying solution.

Joseph
Commings' "Bones for Davy Jones."

An
excellent story of a diver who was stabbed while alone in a shipwreck.

Joseph
Commings' "Murder Under Glass."

Commings
had one of the most versatile minds when it came to finding new variations and
perspectives on the impossible problem: like putting a corpse on display in a
glass room that's bolted on the inside and delivering the kind of solution you
expect from such an original premise.

Joseph
Commings' "The X Street Murders."

His most celebrated short story and often tagged as his master piece, in which someone
is shot in an office under constant observation and the smoking gun is
delivered within minutes inside a sealed envelope. I have to re-read and review that
collection one of these days.

Edmund
Crispin's "The Name on the Window."

A dead
man is found inside a house and the only footprints leading up to it belong to
the unfortunate victim.

David
Stuart Davies' "The Curzon Street Conundrum."

A
shipping magnate is murdered at his Curzon Street mansion, again, inside a
locked room, and the solution is incredible cheeky, but clever, and a trick I
had never seen before – which is why I still remember it after all these years.

Carter
Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood."

Twenty
years before the opening of this story, a young girl, named Vicky, disappeared
from a house that was locked and bolted from the inside – only to reappear a
week later with a story that she had been living with the fairies. When she returns to
the house two decades later, she disappears again under similar circumstances, but this time it
becomes a grim fairy-tale.

Carter Dickson's "The Silver Curtain."

A young man looses
everything, except his ticket to return home, in a French casino and is
approached by a shady characters who offers him a wad of money in exchange for
a favor: he has to sneak a bottle of pills pass custom services. However, the
entire plan collapses like a house of cards when he witnesses how an invisible
assailant stabs his new employer in an empty cul-de-sac. I have to come to the
conclusion that this is perhaps one of my favorite tricks for this kind of impossible
crime. So simple and effective.

Lois H. Gresh & Robert Weinberg's "Death
Rides the Elevator."

This story almost reads like a homage to Rex Stout and John Dickson Carr, in which a man is decapitated while riding alone
in his private elevator and Penelope Peters, a female Nero Wolfe, and Sean
O'Brien, her Archie Goodwin, look into the matter.

Note: I solved the locked room before reading
the story. I'm that good. :)

Susanna Gregory's "Ice Elation."

A research team on the Antarctic Continent are
about to drill their way to an ancient repository of water, sealed between the
rocks and ice since the dawn of men, and who knows what evolution concocted and
created in that natural "locked room" – which is a fear that is becoming
reality when members of the team begin to disappear one after another under
baffling circumstances. Scooby Doo for grown ups!

A seemingly innocent snowman, dressed up as a
soldier, is magically endowed with life and witnesses see him savaging a man
with a rifle before resuming an innocent posture.

Paul Halter's "The Flower Girl."

This is perhaps my favorite Paul Halter story,
in which Santa Claus may have murdered an extremely unpleasant, Scrooge-like
man. Pure Gladys Mitchell, if she had written locked room mysteries.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Impossible Murder."

A man is murdered, while alone in his car, in
the middle of a traffic jam and the explanation is wonderfully simple. Hoch's
brain must have been a beehive of crime with all those plot ideas buzzing
around. It's unbelievable he penned close to a 1000 stories in his lifetime and
it's a shame he was not given a few more years to reach that magical number. It
would've been more than deserving!

Edward D. Hoch's "The Long Way Down."

Here's another example of that devilish brain
of his: a man falls from a skyscraper and does not mess up the pavement until a
few hours later. Realism be damned; more of this please!

Edward D.
Hoch's "The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery."

My first
meeting with Edward Hoch and Dr. Hawthorne, who's specialized in taking away
those feverish hallucinations of hobgoblins, invisible men and curses that can
often be the side effect of an impossible crime. This time a fresh corpse is
found in a coffin that lay undisturbed in the soil for decades. Hoch was much
closer to Commings than to Carr, IMO.

H. Edward
Hunsburger's "Eternally Yours."

This is
one of my all-time favorite detective stories, in which an artist for hard
covers uncovers the secrets of his new apartment. The previous tenant died
behind locked doors after an apparent domestic accident, but his ghost keeps
sending letters to a chess buddy from beyond the grave.

A pair of severed legs from a murdered man
vanish from a locked and guarded tent and it's up the downtrodden Ghote to
find a logical explanation.

Note: Keating ripped-off Edmund Crispin for the
solution, but also improved it and neatly tied it in with Indian culture and I
hated that Crispin story anyway. So I can forgive him for taking something
lousy and turning into something great, which this story is.

Ronald Knox's "Solved by Inspection."

The closest anyone ever came to writing a story
that feels like it could've been penned by G.K. Chesterton, in which a man
starved himself to death in his locked bedroom while he was surrounded with
food. Knox's series detective, Miles Bredon, proves that the man was murdered
under extremely cruel circumstances.

A master clock maker is shot to death in his
shop and the murderer must have been his brother, who had a shop of his own
across the street and he hated his brother, but he had a cast-iron alibi for
the time of the murder. A story that fits together like the innards of a Swiss
watch and has a nifty twist on an otherwise hackneyed plot-device.

Hugh Pentecost's "The Day the Children
Vanished."

A small town is thrown into a panic when a bus
full of children drive into a dugway and failed to show up on the other end.
It's just a very satisfying mystery, but also a very well told story with a
smash ending and a great detective.

The body of a man is found on a small beach and
the only footprints on the beach are those of the victim and his dog. Porges
provides this problem with one of the best solutions for the no-footprints
tricks. Absolutely brilliant!

Arthur Porges' "The Scientist and the Wife
Killer."

A man under grave suspicion of having buried
his previous wives prematurely electrocutes his latest wife, inside a bolted
bathroom, without any electric appliances in the room and her husband was miles
away at the time of her death. One of those rare, but successful, inverted mysteries
in which the impossible situation replaces the whodunit aspect.

One of the most complex short stories in this
particular sub-genre, in which a convicted murderer disappears from a locked
and guarded execution shack less than a minute after he was dropped through its
roof with a stiff rope around his neck. Improbably? Yes, but also absolutely
awesome.

Bill Pronzini's "Booktaker."

Nameless takes on an
undercover assignment at a bookstore where a wraithlike thief has been
smuggling valuable maps past a perfect operating security system. The solution
is uncomplicated, workable and first class.

Bill Pronzini's "Medium Rare."

Arguably the best
story in this collection, in which Quincannon and Carpenter, masquerading as
the fictitious Mr. and Mrs. John Quinn, set-out to expose professor Vargas,
head of the Unified College of the Attuned Impulses, as a fraudulent medium –
who made an art out of financially draining the grieving. The professor puts on
a fantastic spook show in his locked and darkened séance room, where tables
move on their own accord and luminous faces from the spirit world take a peek
at our plain of existence, but then the Grim Reaper puts in an appearance – and
Vargas is stabbed while everyone was holding hands and the locked door
prevented any outsider from coming in!

I have a sneaking
suspicion that this tale was penned as a tribute to John Dickson Carr. The
story has an atmospheric setting and a premise that revolves around apparently
supernatural occurrences and an impossible stabbing, but there were also a few
laugh-out-loud moments – as Carpenter and Quincannon were channeling the spirit
of Sir Henry Merrivale when it was their turn to ask the spirits questions!
Full marks for this story!

Bill Pronzini's "Where Have You Gone, Sam
Spade?"

Nameless is laboring
under the naïve assumption that he's earning an easy fee, when he agrees to
fill-in as a temporary night watchman for an importing company. The facility he
has to guard already resembles an impenetrable fortress, where he can kick back
with a pulp magazine most of the time, but it takes more than locks and
shuttered windows to stop the detective curse – and before long he has to find
an explanation as to how a body could be introduced into a building that is the
equal to a sealed box. The solution to the reversed locked room problem is as
simple as it's clever as well as the identity and motive of the murderer. Great
title, by the way!

The miracle problem was not a specialty of
Ellery Queen, but when they dabbled into it it was nearly always memorable, if
not always successful. A locked room that turned inside out, a train that
disappears between two stations or, in this case, an entire house.

One of
those rare, but successful, inverted locked room mysteries from the Japanese
father of the detective story and perhaps the most interesting mystery from his
hand that has thus far appeared in the English language.

Clayton
Rawson's "From Another World."

This story was the
result of a sporting challenge between Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr, in
which they competed against one another to see who could come up with the best
possible solution to the following premise: a murder has taken place in a room
that's not only locked from the inside, but also completely sealed shut with
tape! It's one of Rawson's finest tales and I think it won him this little
wager with the grandmaster himself.

You can find John Dickson Carr's answer to this
challenge in He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944) – published under the
byline Carter Dickson.

A straight forward locked room mystery from the Queen
of Screwball Comedy with an inventive and original solution.

John Sladek's "By an Unknown Hand."

An award-winning short story that landed the author a
contract to pen the locked room classic Black Aura (1974), but in this
story his detective, Thackeray Phin, is confronted with a strangulation in a
locked and windowless apartment and consults the Dr. Fell and Father Brown
stories for a solution.

Hal
White's "Murder at An Island Mansion."

The
author strings together no less than three murders of the no-footprints variety
and they appear to be work of a menacing ghost. Not exactly of the same caliber
as Carr or Talbot, atmosphere or plot-wise, but therefore not any less
enjoyable. Hopefully, White has not retired from this field. We need
neo-orthodox writers like him!

Hal
White's "Murder on a Caribbean Cruise."

Reverend
Dean takes a cruise to relax and reflex on his life, but than someone is
murdered and the scene of the crime is a locked cabin – turning this pleasure
cruise in a regular Busman's Holiday for the modern-day Father Brown.

"Murder
on a Carribbean Cruise" would’ve been a great alternative title for this
story. Ok. I deserve to be punched in the face for that pun.

Cornell
Woolrich's "The Room With Something Wrong."

From all
the Rooms-That-Kill stories I have read, this one ranks at the very top and
concerns a hotel room with a will of its own and decides when guests have
overstayed their welcome by hurdling them out of the window in the dead of
night.

James
Yaffe's "The Problem of the Emperor's Mushroom."

Paul Dawn, the only member of the Homicide Squad's Department
of Impossible Crimes, listens to Professor Bottle's historical account of
the murder of the Roman Emperor Claudius – and the impossible angle to his
demise. A poison was administered in his favorite dish of mushrooms that didn't
affect the Emperor's food-taster, but threw him in a violent convulsion. I
reveled at the double layered structure of the story, that runs for only 14
pages, and James Yaffe, who was only sixteen at the time he wrote it, should be
commended for it. A thoroughly enjoyable story!

Israel
Zangwill's "The Big Bow Mystery."

One of
the corner stones of the locked room genre and one of the first stories that
rose above the banality of hidden passages, venomous creatures and unknown
poisons. Unfortunately, the solution has been copied to death, but that should
never reflect back on this story. It may also have introduced the multiple
solution ploy that is usually associated Anthony Berkeley and Ellery
Queen.

The Usual Suspect

An Elementary Observation

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants.

Witnesses' Statements

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre)."The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).